GROUP SELFISHNESS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 218, 13 August 1940, Page 8

GROUP SELFISHNESS.

ORDER ONLY SECTIONAL,

AUCKLAND, Aug. 12.' Commenting on, the order of the Court of Arbitration increasing wages by 5 per cent., the New Zealand Herald says:— “People would do well to remember that in fact tbe order is not general, but sectional. It applies only to those working under awards. They alone are being compensated for the increased cost of living. Other and very large classes must defray it as beat they can, and also the costs now to be added to pay award workers an additional 5 per cent. . . . The result must be, of course, that the unsheltered will have to bear their own share of war deprivations and that of award workers as well. This process used to be called exploitation b4Ja privileged class; Mr Maynard Keynes, often quoted by Labour leaders, stigmatises it as ‘group selfishness’ and ‘hustling someone else out of the queue.’ Certainly it is not social justice, the ideal professed by Labour. . . . In placing the purchasing power of award workers at a record level, the Judge cuts across the dictum of Mr Nash in the Budget that ‘the necessary (war) sacrifice must be made by consuming less goods.’ “The Court has seen to it that award workers shall not be pinched. But higher money wages will not increase the supply of _ goods. Actually, the effect of the war is to decrease tfie supply. The increased workers’ demand for a dwindling supply must, therefore, force up prices and start that inflationary process the Government desires above all things to avoid. Higher, wages granted to meet higher prices will simply drive prices up again, causing a further application to the Court, and another chase up the vicious spiral. To that there can be no end, except in outright inflation and economic collapse —a 'dlapse the more inevitable in a country dependent on

exports that have to be Isold in competitive world markets at prices catering for ma6s demand. ’